Richard Henry Lee’s tenure in the chair arrives in the afterglow of a miracle and the onset of a long migraine. The miracle was the war’s end—Washington’s graceful bow at Annapolis, the definitive treaty now in hand, the last redcoats filing onto ships. The migraine was everything that followed: soldiers’ certificates turning to dust in taverns, creditors knocking at doors, frontier fires flaring where maps pretended to make peace, states bargaining with themselves about whether promises made as a Union might be honored as a state. Into that atmosphere, in late 1784, came a tall Virginian whose fame had been forged eight years earlier in a single, flint-striking sentence—his resolution that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” The drama of that day in June 1776 had branded him into the memory of ever ...